ICANN and Verisign made these changes in secret, without consulting or
incorporating feedback from the ICANN community or Internet users.
ICANN has a history of making similar deals behind closed doors and also
of ignoring unified opposition against such actions.
The changes to the .COM agreement will have a much bigger impact on the
Internet than the previous action for .ORG, .INFO, and .BIZ domains, due to
the dominance of .COM. There are 359.8 million total domain names, of which
144 million are .COM — that’s 40% of all domain names. With 161.8 million
country-specific TLDs (ccTLDs), there are 198 million generic TLDs (gTLDs).
That means that .COM makes up 73% of all gTLD domain names.
ICANN was created in part to introduce competition between domain name
registrars, but now ICANN itself is at the heart of the problem, without
considering any input from Internet users on these critical decisions.
At issue:
Price increases of 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Then
continuing in 2026, 2027, 2028, and 2029.
ICANN receives and extra $20 million from Verisign. No reasons why this
happened.
ICANN also had rules that the operator of a TLD could not operate a domain
name registrar. Although in 2012 ICANN allowed operators of new gTLDs to
have domain name registrars, it did not apply to Verisign. The new contract
will allow Verisign to operate its own registrar, except for selling .COM
domain names itself. To circumvent this, it is also possible that Verisign
could act as a reseller of .COM domains, through another registrar. This
result is that the company that controls almost 80% of the registrar
pricing for domain names will compete directly with all domain registrars,
maximizing its control of domain name pricing to the detriment of other
competing registrars.
ICANN Ignored Previous Comments - As detailed on Standing Up to ICANN to
Keep Domain Prices in Check and pricecaps.org, over 3,500 comments were
submitted in support of price controls for the .ORG, .INFO, and .BIZ TLDs.
Only six comments supported removing price controls. ICANN discounted the
comments that were in favor of maintaining price caps. A number of the
comments were submitted using an online tool, which caused the comments to
be discounted as “spam” by the ICANN Ombudsman. ICANN removed the price
caps, primarily relying upon a biased preliminary analysis from 2009 by an
economics professor that did not reference any data.
This cannot stand. I have several .com domains and cannot afford 7%
increases every year.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20/attachments/20200210/f5e11618/attachment.html>